Trump: 'I would bring back' waterboarding

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Knoxville, Tennessee Thomson Reuters Donald Trump said that he would bring back waterboarding if the US captures members of the terrorist group ISIS.

In an interview on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, Trump pointed to ISIS' gruesome beheading of journalist James Foley last year to justify the return of what former President George W. Bush's administration referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques."

"I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they do to us," Trump told host George Stephanopoulos. "What they're doing to us, what they did to James Foley when they chopped off his head, that's a whole different level and I would absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation."

Trump had said earlier this summer that the controversial interrogation technique "doesn't sound very severe" compared to ISIS beheadings.

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the CIA tested a number of interrogation methods on captured suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists including sleep deprivation, confinement to small spaces, and waterboarding, which simulates drowning by pouring water over an interrogee's face.

In 2009, the Obama administration banned the practice, which then-Attorney General Eric Holder called "torture."

"Waterboarding is torture. My Justice Department will not justify it, will not rationalize it and will not condone it," Holder said, according to Reuters.

Last year, a Senate Intelligence Committee report found that waterboarding didn't actually work in gleaning important information from detainees, though the CIA maintains that the practice helped the agency obtain information that eventually led to the location of the September 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.